Finding the time

As my in game life get busier with the "joys" of alliance leadership, I find it harder to find the time to get to my blog and write things down. Part of it of course is not wanting to divulge operational items - like say the current location of the system a good chunk of my alliance is in. On the other and after action reports on stuff that ends up in the kill mails is fine.

So, various of my industrialists had gotten roughed up by some local pirates a while ago. And of course my pew pew-ers just want kills. So a wee bit of anti piracy was called for. I'm getting better at this cov-ops stuff. Last night was typical. I logged on and discovered the fleet had gone to 0.0 and managed to get killed by a carrier's fighter quite effectively. Oh dear, missed another suicide training run, whatever shall I do. So I get in fleet and find them re-fitting to go out and do a bit of pirate hunting.

Now the problem with pirates (the not so good ones) is that they tend to be station huggers. So getting a bead on one of these can be rather difficult since you can rely on them being in station unless there's some industrial to pop in the area. So I tend to operate in a cov-ops for anti pirate work. One day when I get into a rapier I"ll be using that instead.

Anyways, in I go to Mya and get my combat probes out and start scouting for pirates. I spot loganfire and little loganfire but they are way too station huggy. In the entire 2h op I think I only saw him get away from the station once. That looked like it was to kill/chase off a Maelstrom doing an anomaly. During this time I find that he is rather friendly with a yellow noobish pirate wanabe.

Side note: If you fly without getting agressed by a pirate in multiple situations where I would expect a pirate to start tackleing you including at an anomally I'm going to asume that even if you are not blinky red, you are definitly associated with this pirate and are hence open game. Pirates who hide behind higher sec status just annoy me.

Anyways so our pirate's friend is being just a wee tad less paranoid about his ships than the more tempting flasy. And we've come to the conclusion that he's effectively a pirate by his acts. I start setting up a warp in solution while telling my rabid pvp'ers to chill at a planet one system over. This takes a bit of time to setup as mr bladeddevil is coasy up on a cloud in the anomaly.

Some neaky flying later (repositioning myself by about 150km under cloak) I managed to line my target with the gate to the system where my fleet is gathering. As I aproache the line up point I call out on coms: "Ok, it's about to go down in the next few minutes, everyone aproach the gate to Mya. You will be warping to Letrange at 50, repeat you will be warping at 50.

And I managed to stop dead with my target prety much in line with the starget and exactly 50km from me.

"JUMP, JUMP, Warp to Letrange at 50, warp to Letrange at 50." - side comment - never ever say "warp to me" unless you have named your character "me". What followed was an absolutely beautiful tackle. The claw landed 4km from bladeddevil, the vexor 800m. When you're flying a cov-ops and trying to get a warp in on someone it just doesn't get much better than that. Biggest complaint about the fight: There were 3 ships that didn't get in on the kill because they were too slow.

The rest of the evening was rather un-eventful, the pew pew guys went over to Old Man Star at one point but by then I was deep in talks with another prospective corporation to grow my alliance. Such is the life of an alliance leader - an hour or two of fun followed by large quantities of adminstrative trivia. Mynxee will understand.